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- [00:04]
A
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some drink champagne Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, December 8, 2025, and we are brought to you today by our friends at the University of Austin, also known as uatx. Look, you know you've been excited by the creation of this brand new university since you heard about it a couple of years ago. Imagine a university, a place where students turn down the University of Chicago, my alma mater, and flee Columbia's Hamas rallies to read great books. Both the great source of the reputations of the University of Chicago and Columbia. The great books courses in small seminars where they discuss the Bible and politics with commentary contributors like Leah Leibovitz and Mike Duran. An apprentice with America's top entrepreneurs. This place exists. Our friend Barry Wiseko founded it. We're talking about the University of Austin, uatx. While Harvard hands out A's like candy, UATX produces the Navy Seals of the mind. No great inflation, and a simple application based purely on test scores. And guess what? UATX is free because it just eliminated tuition forever. I got a 10th grader. I didn't know this until I got this ad copy. I don't know how I missed it. I am going to learn more from my 10th grader@uaustin.org that's uaustin.org and while others here don't have 10th graders who are having to think about college, we're still all here. We got a full house. We got executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
We have senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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C
Hi, John.
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A
We have social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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D
Hi, John.
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A
And we have Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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E
Hi, John.
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A
Sadly, Christine and I have kids around the same age in college. We didn't get a free tuition option. I don't know what I'm going to do with this information. I'm sorry, this is hoo boy, because the bills are. I'm paying the bills right now. Anyway.
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So much to talk about. Pete Hegseth continues to be the subject of the hour, the day, the week. You know, the cold open of Saturday Night Live was making fun of Pete Hegseth. Sunday shows all about Pete Hegseth. We're still. If you watch the morning shows this morning, it was like questions are still being asked of the increasing pressure on Pete Hegseth. To Pete Hegseth is Pete Hegseth I don't know where this increasing pressure is from. The pressure seems to actually have abated last week as we talked about on Friday with the testimony of Admiral Bradley.
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I still have problems with everything that's going on, but the framing, the media framing that, oh, Pete Hegseth is in trouble, Kristi Noem may be in trouble. The Homeland Security secretary, that's the latest gossip is that she may be ousted in favor of Glenn Youngkin.
- [03:52]
B
But also, I just want to say, John, on the Hegseth thing, part of the framing that's weird to me is they're now starting to talk about the strike in the Caribbean as a double tap. That's not a double tap. A double tap is what, like Vladimir Putin does. You hit a target once, then you wait for everyone to come and try to rescue the site, and then you hit it again and you kill all the civilians who showed up afterwards.
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A
You know where the double tap was used with unbelievable brutality and monstrousness, was during the second Intifada, particularly in Jerusalem, where, yeah, there would be a hit, there'd be a bombing, and then the first responders would show up, and then there would be a second bombing to kill the first responders. So that was a constant feature of the, of, of the second intifada. And unbelievably dispiriting, by the way, like one of those things that, like, cuts the heart out of people as it, as it's happening. And of course, what you're describing with Putin happened over the weekend in, you know, in Kiev. And we can talk about where the administration is going on Ukraine, which is, in my view, no place good. But to get back to Pete Hegseth, two very important things happened with Pete Hegseth this weekend. One, he delivered his first, I would say, major address as Secretary of Defense or war. And second, the release of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which effectively seems to have been written probably by both things, by his policy planning chief, Eldridge Colby.
- [05:35]
And interestingly enough, though, I have many problems with Pete Hegseth and problems with this policy, and have many problems with Elbridge Colby dating back to his policy, his book writing days and essay writing appearances at conferences. I was in large measure favorably impressed by the National Security Strategy. And Abe and Eliana, I think you guys had similar feelings in part about the Hegseth speech.
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B
Well, I'm fine with the policy as it's laid out.
- [06:15]
What really rankles me, and it's hardly an isolated incident, and it's been going on for a long time. Is that really beginning with the Obama administration?
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Every sort of policy rollout from every administration seems first and foremost aimed at other Americans with whom that administration disagrees with. And I think it broadcasts a terrible message, especially coming from the Defense Department to the rest of the world. Hegseth he did a lot of comparing Trump. He tried to frame Trump as the true heir to Reagan. And I think there are all sorts of problems with that. And I see where he's going with that in terms of military buildup and speaking to our enemies and war is a last resort, and I get all that. But Trump has none of the ideological spine that was at the heart. Spine can't beat the heart, can it? None of the ideological spine of Reagan's.
- [07:19]
Military and defense posture. But what gets me the most is he never shuts up about the neocons and about the nation builders or about the woke policymakers.
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Of the Democratic Party. And it's like I was listening to it, and I was thinking, you don't hear this coming out of other great powers when their governments speak. You know, in the west, it's not a constant attack on their domestic rivals, with some exception for Israel. You do sort of hear that from them. And I think it broadcasts a tremendous weakness and an opening for bad actors, which. And it makes perfectly clear why.
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Powers like Russia, Qatar, Iran, China, love to get involved in our social media, particularly with the aim of furthering the chaos and the fracturing of American public opinion, because every administration goes out there and screams about how horrible other Americans are. That's my big problem with it. I think the posture is mostly fine.
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E
Abe.
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A couple of things since you had said that in our text chain over the weekend, it got me thinking about it, and I don't disagree with what you're saying, but it did occur to me that in democracies, our fractures and disagreements are just more visible than in autocracies, the countries to which you compared us. So I think that just does happen, although I wish it didn't. I actually liked Teg says speech, though I would have preferred he was, you know, sort of less. Had a little bit less, I guess I would say was a little bit less sharp towards the neocons, the nation builders, you know, what have you, because I was one of them back in the day. So, you know, I took it personal. But I did think what I took away from it was that it was a real, almost perfect articulation of where I think the president is, and that if Trump listened to this speech, he would have liked it a lot because Trump is also harshly and personally critical of the neocons and the nation builders, you know, from going back to 2015. And so I thought it went a long way to explaining why Hagseth has succeeded in this administration. And while I may have not liked the J jabs at the neocons, there were parts about it I did like. He and the things I think will be of particular interest to our audience were, you know, he vocally defended the Iran strikes of June. He vocally defended the strikes in the Straits of Hormuz against the Houthis and contrasted that to the Biden administration's lack of action. And I think more than what was in the national Security strategy, spoke to the need to deter China from Taiwan. So all of that was interesting. And I do think it's worth, for those, you know, for the members of the listening audience interested in national security, I do think it's worth listening to because I think it's a pretty good articulation of where this administration is. Also, he spoke forcefully about a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. And that was a main takeaway from the National Security strategy, which puts an ideological framework, I think, on what's happening in with regard to Venezuela.
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A
And I'll say this, I'll just say.
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B
This, that's good about the speech. He spoke about Israel as an ally. That steps up.
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A
Right. He calls it, by the way, the Trump Corollary or the document refers to the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which is an interesting, this is how, you know, probably Bridge Colby wrote it. Corollaries to doctrines is a sort of classic foreign policy notion or conceit. So you sort of have to be educated in the history of the way these terms are thrown around in order to really, you know, make make sense out of it. I think partially what Abe is referring to, and we're focusing on the attack on the neocons, obviously there are also attacks on implicit or explicit attacks on Obama and Biden and their pursuits of things and all that. It's not just, you know, that we're arguing because it's they're being mean to us. In fact, I don't even know how mean. I think what's interesting about it is it's now 20, almost 21 years since George W. Bush delivered the second inaugural address in which he proposed essentially a century long effort to bring the world into a kind of universal democratic alliance.
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E
It was to end tyranny in our time.
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A
Right, but, but, but in the book. Right. So the phrase became ending tyranny and we were going to end tyranny. And that this struck people as being insanely expansive, unworldly, you know, sort of like utopian and sort of a violation of.
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Any kind of limits. The guy who came in to say we need to have a restrained foreign policy was now becoming this evangelist. In fact, the speech attempted to qualify that by saying if we do X, Y and Z over the course of many, many, many generations, we can get to this point. But that emendation has not been noted. And it's why the speech was a disaster. I mean it's one of the one in policy terms, one of the worst things a president has ever done was delivering that speech because it over in a way that meant that everything was ever going to be underdelivered and provided a kind of giant target to provide, you know, like a strawman that everyone can attack from Obama to Trump to everyone. But it's interesting because they're still talking about it as though it was the guiding force of American foreign policy in this national security strategy. Basically says since the beginning of the Cold War, and that is a Caricature and a Ms. All American presidencies say things like we believe in peace, we want, we know we want peace, we want democracy to spread and all of that. And then they don't do much about it for the most part. This is since the end of the Second World War. We are going to free the world and all of that. And then you know, communist nations rise up in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, all of that. And then we don't do anything to help them or we let, or the Soviet tanks roll in and we stand there mute because of course we do calculate, we have always calculated what the cost benefit analysis of getting overly involved or too involved or too militarily enwrapped. And then there are moments in which we kind of fall. We are, we end up like Vietnam, Korea and you could say Iraq, baby. We end up falling backward into almost into involvement. But we're not the initiators of the involvement. We're the responders to the involvement.
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D
Ah, okay, can I jump in here? Because you mentioned communism and responding to involvement and that is where I really want to say I do not agree that the strategy document is as. Is as healthy a strategy as we might want to believe it to be. It has huge omissions here and it is actually not a long term strategy document with regard to China because they're looking ahead to April when he's going to meet with Xi and he's very worried about the trade negotiations and very much concerned about the economic hardship here at home. This document says almost nothing about Chinese cybersecurity infiltration. And if you follow what's going on, I mean just last week the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency which tracks all this stuff listed another advisory, one of many they listed talking about how China has once again targeted critical infrastructure sensitive networks. They don't of course reveal this is in the US and Canada, but they were government and IT entities. So we're talking about the power grid, we're talking about government agencies. They are constantly in our business and they are doing it as an aggressive enemy of this country, not as an ally, even if we want to talk about trade. So the lack of discussion of any of that in this strategy document strikes me as a worry about short term economic and trade negotiations at the expense of our long term security interests with China. And so again, like our listeners know, I'm no fan of Hegseth. I tend to agree with you all about his speech, but I think his reassurance about Taiwan was less impactful given how little Chinese aggression was addressed in the strategy document.
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B
Can I just add quickly to Christine's point, There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that scared the daylights out of me. So China is on track to have the largest trade surplus in history.
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So for all our talks about tariffs and for all the Chinese.
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Anti tariff talk, they are.
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Selling everything and destroying or trying to destroy every other market around and every other manufacturing hub around. And I don't know what our response is for that either.
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C
Well, the document does go said something in the follow up, you know, after the speech he did a Q and A where he was asked about, you know, where he, he this is what I thought was funny also, you know, they sort of wrapping themselves in Reagan's flag. But while decrying the neocons who you know, as far as foreign policy ardot are most famous for joining the Reagan administration and you know, helping to steer a certain, you know, so called Washington consensus and, and whatever. But so they're still fighting over Reagan. But he said, you know, he was asked about the budget, the military budget and that was the first question he got is, you know, we're not spending all that much, right? So what's going to happen? And he and Hegseth said, well you're going to like what you're going to see from the President's budget and the strategy going forth because we've got to rebuild the defense industrial base. He talked about this. He repeated it. So one of the answers about all this stuff is something that has been floating around in these, like more obviously hegseth not an isolationist but in the, in the, in the part of the party that tends to like the neocon bashing also which tends to be a bit more isolation is they, they talk about this, the industrial base and that it's a two for. It's the sort of thing where you're going to improve the local economy, make the tariffs less.
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You know, hurt less.
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And sort of disentangle ourselves from China in certain ways while also, you know, breaking out into our, you know, into our own self reliance on that a little bit in the way, you know, politicians used to talk about being energy independent. So the, the, I would pay attention to that because he said, you know, then the, the second question was basically the same question because you know, he, he said height of the Reagan administration we were spending 6% of GDP on defense. @ the low end of the Carter administration we were spending 4.5%. Now we're spending 3%. So it was really driving home that we aren't spending nearly as much on this. And he just kept saying, the thing that he kept saying is first of all, yes, the budget's going to go up, the military budget's going to go up. But also he kept going back to this idea of the industrial base and combined combining, you know, a sort of re industrialization of America with foreign.
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A
Policy.
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You know what's interesting by the.
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D
Way, has no, has no basis in reality. Given this administration's policy on AI and the subsidies to AI and the. And the fact that he's meeting with farmers. Trump is meeting with farmers today to try to calm them down about beef prices. And I mean there's a lot going on with regard to the tariff policy that is absolutely in conflict with the. The so called industrial.
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A
Policy.
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So if you do the twofer, right. If you look at. And you say, okay, well, we need. And we need an improved industrial base in order to.
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Ramp up our defense capabilities.
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That'S an interesting way of, if they were to pursue it. And of course, part of Trump's problem as a policymaker is he pursues nothing, brings up something, and then he forgets it. And, you know, he's very distractible. And this is a. If you were to very seriously say we need to follow a strategy against China that is not all that dissimilar from the strategy that we followed against the Soviet Union, even though we are not in the same kind of ideological conflict with the Soviet, with China, because China's a different kind of player, but that one of the ways that we succeeded in destroying the Soviet Union was spending it into oblivion and using our technological innovation to wildly out distance them. And this started in the late 1940s and is the reason, among other things, for the unbelievable prosperity of the state of California from the late 1940s until the mid-1990s, which was that California, it wasn't because of Hollywood and the beaches and the Beach Boys and the Laurel Canyon music scene that California became the paradise of America. It was defense spending that made California the paradise of America. It's why people flocked to California for jobs. It's where we built our Cold War military for the most part. And so when the defense, you know, when the Cold War ended and we got the, you know, we, we, we ramped down our defense spending and we've, we've allowed that base to atrophy. We've allowed a couple of airplane manufacturers to basically go into receivership and all that. If we were serious about the idea that what we need is to be, we have, we need a domestic, totally domestic weapons production ramp up, because we can't outsource that because the technological advantages will be stolen from us. If we ask India to build our missiles, for example, like, they'll have plans on our missiles that we don't want them to have or that kind of thing. But that's not what the strategy document said. It kind of elides all of that and does not provide a target number. Right. Doesn't say, we're at three, we need to go to five. It says Europe needs to go to five. Very specifically, it says Europe needs. European countries, NATO countries need to commit to spending 5% of their GDP on defense spending. Well, you know what? That's great. What about us? Maybe we should commit 5% of our GDP to defense spending. So we'll provide them with the proper example. So there are issues that I have with the document. That's not what I liked about it, and I did not expect to like it. And there are things about it I don't like. And I don't like the reliance on tariffs and all of that.
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Where it gets interesting is in its depiction of what we call soft power. That is to say, soft power is the non military effort to extend American interest in the world by using non military and non monetary means to evangelize, in some sense, for the United States. And what does it say? It says we need to go around the world unapologetic and unashamed about who we are, about what we stand for. And Europe, the wellspring of our, you know, Western civil Europe needs to stand up for Europe and for European civilization. Europe needs to. Needs to restore its civilizational self confidence and not go down the path in which European essentially stops being Europe in part because of mass migration and in part because the elites in these countries and implicitly in the United States no longer believe in the superiority of the West. And that has to change. And that's what we should be doing with our soft power. And it's interesting because that's not. That's a new twist for Trump. I mean, there are hints of it in some of the aesthetics of the administration, right? Like he wants to have classical architecture because that's, you know, that, that's beauty and that's the way America look. You know, things look good. And all this other stuff that we imported from the Bauhaus and all that is terrible. Or, you know, we need to celebrate celebrities and art, works of art and stuff like that that praise America instead of attack America and all that. But it hasn't really been a thing to say we're better than everybody else and we're gonna go around the world and we're gonna say we're better and we're gonna tell you why and all of that. And that's. I don't know if it counts. I don't know if it means anything. I don't know if it's gonna have any effect whatsoever or whether it just came out of Bridge Colby's computer.
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D
Program. Well, I think you're forgetting one part of that argument. The further point that was made in the strategy document was explicit support for Europe's far right political parties right now, because I think they see in those parties the attempt to reclaim whatever vision of Western civilization they think has decayed. And that is a. I mean, the irony being that that's obviously meddling in the politics of foreign nations, which is exactly what they say we shouldn't be doing. But we'll set that aside. I think that is a miss. That's a step they didn't need to take but chose to for ideological reasons. I agree with you on the first part. I mean the particularly the emphasis on open border policy and what it has done to nations in Europe over the last several decades, which hopefully will open us up to our own discussion of the favorite immigration story we all read over the weekend. But that's for a moment later. But I think that's where you see the ideological core of the next iteration of MAGA ism. Whether it's Vance or other, another person who's it's, it's a leader. But that's the part that I saw as being the nod to the, that really hardcore base that thinks Hungary is a model for.
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A
Civilization. Look, I'm not. Again, I don't defend. There are things. This is Trump. One of the things that Trump brought to American politics was this idea that while he walks around saying we should be non interventionist, he also gets to go around and say this guy should win in Honduras and that guy should win in Germany and this guy should win in France and that guy should win in England and this guy is an idiot. Like that's what American presidents never did ever before, you know, And Trump is like, we don't want, we're going around in search of monsters to destroy. And then he's actually literally involving himself in domestic political choices in countries off far from us of which we know little. So I mean, that's awful and it shouldn't be in a strategy document. So. But as Eliana would say, that's it reflects the Trump, that reflects who Trump is and what he's done. The question is, are there things in this document, what does it say about. It is an effort to assert the idea that America needs to move through the world with self confidence. And I am surprised by that because remember, Trump began his first administration with the idea that we're living in a time of American carnage. He goes, he talks to Bill O'Reilly and says we shouldn't go around saying anything about any other country because what are we so angelic and wonderful. And there's been this shift into a kind of.
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Jacksonian patriotism. That's better than having no patriotism at all. Even if I have problems with.
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D
The Jacksonian patriotism apology tours which we got under.
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A
Obama. Exactly. So, so and it's Interesting, because I just think that the. There are many things to quibble with, but the essential idea that we are under. We're going to shift from a policy in which we walk around the world saying, we're not you guys, you do whatever you want. Now, there are weird nods to that where he says things like, why are we going around hectoring wonderful monarchies in the Middle East? We keep going around telling these countries in the Middle east how their government should be structured, which is something that Tom Barrack, the, the, Our, our envoy to Lebanon said over the weekend also, like, yeah, I mean, Israel's a great democracy and everything, but let's face it, I mean, nice. Not nice.
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What did he say? Monarchies. Nice. Autocratic.
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B
Monarchies. Benevolent monarchies or benevolent.
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A
Kingdom? Benevolent. Yeah. Monarchies are what.
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C
Really. I'm in Israel. I'm in Israel right now. There, There's a certain measure of support for restoring the divinic monarchy. If, if that is something that they'd be.
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A
Interested. Hey, don't. We're not going there. We're not going there to the Davidic monarchy. Because then I'm going to start getting. Mayor Soloveitch going to call me. He wants to do that. This is not. We don't need to go there. But I do think there is.
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E
Yeah. John, I'm just thinking, as you say this, to tie the two things together, the strategy document and the Hegseth speech. Hegseth gave his speech at the Reagan foundation, you know, some event. But he was out at the Reagan. It looked like the Reagan. What's it.
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A
Called? With Reagan Policy.
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E
Forum. I think the Reagan Policy Forum. So he was out in Simi Valley giving this speech. And as he spoke, he, he, you know, the frame for his speech was about Trump as the rightful inheritor of Reagan's. Reagan's legacy. And I thought to myself, look, I'm glad they aspire to make this argument that Reagan is still someone they admire and that they wanna make the argument that Trump is operating in the shadow of. In the footsteps of Reagan and that Reagan remains a lodestar. And it occurs to me as you're talking about this that, well, Trump doesn't have Reagan's idealism about America. That is a shining city on a hill. And Reagan said if he had one wish, it would be to take the Russians and fly them in a helicopter all over the country so that they could see how wonderful this country really is. There is a similarity in what you're talking about in the strategy document where he calls for a reassertion of civilizational self confidence, I think, was the term in Europe to say, respect yourselves. And there's a distinction between what Reagan said, which was.
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The rest of the world should emulate this. We're the shining city on a hill. But, you know, for Trump, he's saying to Americans like, let's respect our heritage. And, hey, you Europeans, respect your heritage.
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A
Too. Right. And I think that's where. That's what I thought was an interesting twist. Reagan, when he was in power for eight years, he had all of this European. The Europeans were largely. And then electorally, after he came in, were largely on board with the Western experiment. You know, he had Thatcher, he had.
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Why am I Schmidt, Cole, Excuse me. He had, you know, he had even Mitterrand, who was a socialist, but as president, was a. Was a believer in sort of like the. What you might call the military extension of French power in the world.
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And so he had.
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C
This. Even the Pope, to a certain degree. Excuse me, even the Pope, to a certain.
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A
Degree. In contrast, not just to a certain degree, the Pope. Absolutely. And so Trump, the United States is kind of alone. I mean, that is, you know, kind of with the exception of Israel. And I would say Zelenskyy to some degree, but he doesn't want Zelenskyy to be that person.
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B
For. But that, that, that, that's a huge, That's a huge.
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Missing piece here in the, in.
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A
The.
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B
Trump. In the Reagan. Trump handoff.
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A
Right. You mean. I mean, Ukraine. Yeah, yeah.
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B
Yeah. And our democratic allies generally. I mean, that, that's, That's a big piece of the puzzle.
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A
Here.
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B
Yeah. In opposing China as well. I mean, you know, just to get back to my trade thing just a little bit, it's sort of hard to form a unified front on China when we're slapping tariffs on our allies and therefore driving them into the arms of the only.
- [36:49]
D
Message. I just, I just. Not to pile on, but I saw the Reagan thing as more of a branding exercise for the Trump administration and less as a. We want to follow this as a model. Because it's true that there wasn't a lot there was scolding of allies. There was absolutely nothing said about some of the risks of China, the real risks. And then Russia was treated very gently. So all of those things are not. I mean, none of those would be recognizable to Ronald Reagan. And I mean, I would point people to. There's a good op ed from a few days ago that Senator Mitch McConnell wrote in the Wall Street Journal kind of outlining why that was a very Reagan escape Ed about spending on defense and why it's important. It actually was in keeping with a lot of what Hegseth said in his speech. But I don't trust that they actually do want to follow Reagan at all. I think they like the sort of lovely glow that it gives them. He was a very powerful president whose legacy continues to be rather good. And right now Trump is facing the opposite of that in terms of how the public and how the world sees him right.
- [37:48]
A
Now. I agree with that. And I know again.
- [37:53]
It'S like the joke, you know, it's like, how's your wife compared to what like this document could have gone any way.
- [38:02]
And except for the stressors that we started on, which is sort of like this. The monster that they seem to want to slay or that Elbridge Colbert seems to want to slay in some weird sense is, you know, the late Michael Gerson, the author of the Bush, you know, 2005.
- [38:21]
Second inaugural address, who was not a neocon. Once again, not a.
- [38:25]
E
Neocon.
- [38:27]
A
John. He was a Catholic subsidiarian and a believer in subsidiarity. Not a neocon with an evangelist, you know, feel, a religious evangelist feel for the reason that the world needed to be free based on Christian doctrine. He was not a neocon. They like to attack the neocons because it's nice shorthand that gives them. I, I don't, we could, we don't need to go into why they like to attack the neocons. But, but given that they attack the neocons, there is much to chew over in this strategy, including the bad stuff like not approaching China and the threats from China in the right way, which I agree with Christine. And this weird idea that somehow, you know, we are the civilizational struggle that he is talking about is not being engaged in by Ukraine, which is exactly where it is being engaged in.
- [39:27]
You know, I mean, it's literally that.
- [39:31]
Ukraine is showing European civilizational self confidence in its self defense way more than any other. If that's, if he wants Europe to follow a model that is somewhere near its, you know, near its center, you, Ukraine is like we are committing blood and treasure to making sure that we are not swallowed up by an authoritarian satrapy. And if we win this war, we will have reset the map of the world in a positive way. Clearly they're not going to win the war as we would understand it. I think that's probably now pretty obvious. But they also don't need to lose it necessarily. But that choice is where it becomes impossible to see A full.
- [40:18]
Full map roadmap, ideological roadmap that the Trump administration is laying out for the Republican Party or America going down the next 15 years, which is what these strategies are supposed to.
- [40:30]
E
Be. I think we should also note quickly, you've given Bridge Colby a lot of credit for writing this document. I suspect that a lot of people had a hand in writing this thing. Neil Ferguson in the Free Press this morning gives Michael Anton credit with penning the first draft. He was the former director of Policy planning at the State Department. And I do suspect that the reason these things read as disjointed as they do is that a lot of people take the pen and generally any product of a whole.
- [41:02]
A
Administration. I think Ferguson is.
- [41:04]
E
Wrong.
- [41:05]
A
Okay. I just, I'm not sure, but I think he's. I think he's wrong. If you've read Bridge Colby, it sounds like Bridge Colby and it does not sound like Michael Anton. Michael Anton has a very. Having edited Michael Anton, I can tell you Michael Anton has a very specific style. This is a very style free document and it is not. It. It reads like Bridge Colby and it sounds like Bridge Colby and I didn't even know he was former.
- [41:32]
It.
- [41:32]
E
Stays.
- [41:33]
A
Yes. I can't hold a job. Okay. Can't hold a job and writes awful things and is terrible. But so had the pun on this. Okay. I don't. I could be wrong. I'm giving Bridge Colby Craig because, you know, Bridge Colby wrote the, he almost certainly wrote the Hegseth speech. And the speech and the national security strategy are very congruent. I mean, they're sort of interlocking. Okay. But I could be wrong. Okay, I'm wrong. I'm going to say I'm wrong. It's not Bridge Colby. How's that? I don't know. Okay. But it's also Kate comes out the weekend that the New York Times.
- [42:16]
Wakes up from its four year coma. Can I, can I say this? Because I just, I just want to. Yeah. I just want to mention we.
- [42:25]
D
Should call this special segment because it's like the second or third time we've gotten to do this and I, and I thrill to it each time. Now it can be told. This is a. We're about to have.
- [42:32]
A
It. Now it can be told. Now it can be told. So I mentioned, for your coma, just this is an early recommendation. I went to see the release of Kill Bill, the whole Bloody Affair, the merger of the two Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill movies into one hole, which is actually how they were made. It is incredibly violent and crazy and a lunatic piece of work, but it is an unalloyed masterpiece. And it's about somebody who goes into a coma for four years, like the New York Times did on the issue of Biden and immigration. And then suddenly a piece comes out this weekend about how Biden lost the thread on immigration beginning in the summer of 2020 when he was just running for president and was alerted by the people who were writing the papers about what he would do if he became president, about how he was going to walk if he wasn't careful, he was going to walk into a gigantic buzzsaw on immigration. And the piece just lays out methodically every single mistake, blindness, self delusion, error that the Biden administration made on on the subject of immigration. It is I loved it so much that I read it twice. That's how much I love this piece. I've I haven't read a piece in the New York Times twice ever. I think this one I just needed to go back over the details.
- [44:04]
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- [45:17]
Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com commentary this is a real.
- [45:25]
E
Good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines.
- [45:29]
A
Customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain.
- [45:35]
D
Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's.
- [45:37]
C
Seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminds me, reminded me of myself when I was that.
- [45:42]
E
Age. That's Andrew, a real United.
- [45:44]
C
Pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's.
- [45:47]
A
Future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the.
- [45:54]
E
Way.
- [45:56]
The piece was amazing.
- [45:59]
What it made clear to me was that immigration, whoever's portfolio it was, you know, Biden said Kamala, deal with it. That these decisions were made by the senior most members of the Biden administration. The piece names President Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn and one other person who I'm blanking on now. But anyhow, like the oh, Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff. That they were warned in explicit terms what would happen and they ignored it. That these people wanted this, the influx of illegal immigrants to be a border state problem, mostly a problem for Republican elected officials to have to grapple with that Greg Abbott of Texas, the governor, thwarted that ambition by busing migrants to states to these states. I think the number in here is, is it 16,000, 160,000 something with a 16. But anyways, a lot of them. Two states led by Democratic officials in northern states who supported the Biden administration's immigration policies. And that is the moment that the Biden administration has identified as the tipping point in the immigration debate. So sit with that for a second. The Democrats who supported these policies having to receive the illegal immigrants and deal with the consequences of those policies was the tipping point in this.
- [47:43]
D
Debate. We talked about it on this podcast. When it started happening, when DeSantis and Abbott and all of them just started this. What, what the New York Times and other outlets were like, what a stupid prank. What a cruel thing to do. And then we were just like, this is the best, you know, political strategy if it's a prank, prank ever. Because they immediately, as you say, Eliana, they suddenly had to put these people someplace and they were everywhere on their streets and their own citizens were suddenly asking questions about how would we afford the care of these folks. And their own policies which were in still in some cases are in direct violation of federal immigration law. They had to act. They had to act in Boston and in Philadelphia and in New York and all of these places where Martha's Vineyard, I think was the one that really became the.
- [48:28]
A
Hilarious. That was the greatest stunt. That was the DeSantis plane flight to Martha's.
- [48:34]
B
Vineyard. But I mean, you know, 50.
- [48:36]
A
People got off the plane and Martha's Vineyard was like, okay, here we.
- [48:40]
B
Are. The amazing thing about the piece is that the Biden administration was Paralyzed from start to finish because they were afraid of how it was going to look to what they perceived as their, their left constituents and to Hispanic Americans that they were, they were afraid of looking mean even once they realized the scope of the problem.
- [49:07]
My favorite part, I'm paraphrasing of the whole also, by the way, it points out how Kamala completely dropped the ball or did nothing right when she was, she was assigned to get to the root causes of the, of the CR of the border crisis and then nothing.
- [49:23]
A
Happened. Oh wait, you remember, you remember the complaint? You remember how she complained? Her people complained. Background. They're always giving us things that.
- [49:33]
D
We can fix the hardest.
- [49:35]
A
Problems. Not fair.
- [49:37]
E
Yeah. Ok. Would have been awkward to have to go to Biden and tell him, you're the problem, sir. Yeah, I found the root cause. It's, it's in the Oval Office. Abe, your mention of Hispanic Americans is especially rich because they turned out to be the people who most opposed the policy. And they all voted for.
- [49:53]
B
Trump. Yep.
- [49:54]
A
Exactly. All of which was, you know.
- [49:56]
C
In the first, in the, but during the Biden administration they had these stories coming out from time to time and one of them was that Biden did this weird thing where he, the first real immigration restrictionist policy, I guess you could call it, was where he floated cutting maybe housing, the refugee number, the number of refugees to be admitted. Right. The refugee ceiling and refugee agencies, you know, were very upset about that. But also everybody was very puzzled because refugees are a very small part of the immigration picture. So you, you wouldn't change the reality of the people who are affected by chaos at the border by cutting out.
- [50:43]
A
Refugees.
- [50:43]
C
Right. Whatever one thinks of the, that situation, it is not really that relevant to the people who were saying there's no policy, there's just pure chaos and something has to be done. So they had this two faced thing for a while where it was like, okay, we'll take a, we'll, we'll do something that will make the left really angry at us and we'll look heartless, but we won't get any, but we won't get any gain out of it. You know, we will make sure to take action that doesn't help us politically in any way, shape or.
- [51:16]
A
Form. Okay. I think, I think that what the story tells in large bore and I think we should credit the reporter Christopher Flavell for his work. We haven't mentioned him yet, but it is a soul byline story which is increasingly uncommon on these large pieces in the New York Times. So he clearly Worked on this for a long time and again, sort of like kind of reporting against interest in a weird way, since, of course, I don't think this is the sort of thing they would prefer to lay out. But it shows the kind of policy desiccation over many years when you become overly fixated on the people in your coalition who claim to speak for a large number of other people.
- [52:06]
It's the kind of synecdoche effect. So how do you know how Hispanics feel? Hispanic organizations come to your office and they tell you how Hispanics feel. How do you think so and so feels how Muslims feel, that you, you, you take the activists and you think that the activists are speaking for everybody and you're afraid of them because you know that the media thinks that the activists speak for everybody and you are sympathetic to them because they are, after all, part of your base. And what they say is here in America, we support, we want to help people, and this is a way of helping people, and we're going to help people. And if you don't do it this way, you're not going to help people. And there's Biden going, well, my dad always said to me, joey, you got to help people. So I'm going to help people. And then people say, Mr. President, you know what? This could have the exact opposite effect. Like, it could turn people against immigrants, and it could lead to a huge snapback and blowback, which is what we're seeing right now. And behavior by the Trump administration in response to what Biden did for four years that seems very, very dramatic and radical. And, you know, you could say, Mr. President, you know, things have unanticipated consequences. You don't want to, like, go all out here. And then when the chart, when the trend lines start going where you see the number of crossings double and then double and then double, and you're like, I guess this isn't working because, you know, there were 100,000 people crossed, and then next month 200,000 people crossed, and then Next month 300,000 people cross, and you're like, you know what? And this is the other great quote in the story. I don't want to talk. I don't want to think about this. I have other things I want to think about more. Which is, by the way, the problem with all strategy documents, like, the strategy, which is, it's like, I'm going to do this, and here's how we're going to conduct America, right? And then something happens in the world and you have to respond to it. It's like, did you expect George W. Bush to become this, you know, evangelist for freedom and democracy? All of that after the way he ran in 2000 and said we need to be more modest in our expectations of the world. No things happen, and you have to shift your policy prescriptions after you see real world consequences of the things that you do. And that's by. They just close their eyes, they shut.
- [54:34]
D
This. Okay, that Corn Pop strategy. We really should emphasize why this piece struck those of us who were following this under President Corn Pop, which was that it wasn't just that they didn't report it, it's that they were blocking reporters who were trying to go to the border and get images and photography, you know, photography. They were actively destroying barriers that the governor of Texas had tried to construct to stop the massive inflow. And they were looking the other way as interest groups, many of which were funded with taxpayer money, were helping illegal border crossers gain the asylum system. And that was going on for years. And so it really was. That's why I think. And these secret flights that would land at these weird regional airports in the middle of the night and just unload people and, you know, local news stories would pop up. And I would say, oh, you're just a conspiracy theorist. Oh, they're not trying to, you know, move a bunch of people into a sort of red district, you know, for the next election. I mean, that's why conspiracy theories happen, is because that was the approach was not just to look the other way, but to actively under the table, help that influx. And I think the Trump administration has a different problem, which is that they're going to the other extreme, in terms of the. At least in tone and rhetoric, with what this country should look like with regard to immigrants, with regard to citizens birthright citizenship, so they'll make the mistake on the other end. But in both cases, there's a tendency to say, well, we want the economy to. We want to make America great again, so inflation can still be bad. And I think with the border with Biden, there was a similar fear of the Latin X group, which is not the same as Hispanic voters. Two very distinct interest groups.
- [56:13]
A
There. But, you know, sorry to Christine's.
- [56:17]
B
Point about the, you know, now it can be told. This has to me, look, I'm glad the story came out. It's a great piece. But this has to me the same slightly sickening quality that the stories of this is how Joe Biden's decline was protected.
- [56:39]
For the past four years. You guys were in on it. Don't forget that. Not you, the Times, the media. You were the ones printing stories week after week saying the border crisis is overblown.
- [56:56]
Trump is trying to use the politics of fear.
- [57:01]
To keep people out of the country and so on and so.
- [57:04]
A
Forth. Look, the important thing here is that that was one line of argumentation, right? It's overblown. So in a rational world in which the media hadn't sort of gone into this weird new frame where you're not allowed to say things that upset your readers because you're now, if you're the New York Times, based on a subscription model, they'll cancel and then you'll be in trouble. You would have a piece that says it's overblown, and then maybe the next day you would have a piece that said it's not overblown. That, that, that went into the other argument. In other words, you get this White House spin and then maybe you go to the Congress and you go to, you know, people whose, whose one of whose, you know, primary issues this was, and they say, no, here's what's happening. Or you go to Greg Abbott or you go to Ron Desant, that you go to their policy people and say, well, what actually, what actually is going on here? And then you publish that. But what, what's left? Which is fine. And that's one of the reasons that Eliana's Washington Free Beacon is as essential as it is and why the free press exists and all that, is that there was a complete abdication of that role by the people who are supposed to transmit information to people. And you know what it did? It blinded liberals and the left to the fact that they were on the wrong side of an issue that was going to end up with their nightmare coming true, which was.
- [58:32]
Trump's return to the White House. And if they had sat there and said, okay, what's going on so that we can prevent Trump from going to the White House, Here were the policies they used to, they tried to use lawfare, right? They tried to, they tried the Epstein, whatever it was that they could come up with, but was it, you know, what we need to do is not engage in stupid, self destructive policies that are ruined, that give Trump policy ballast to go against Biden that aren't. And of course, ultimately the cognitive decline of Biden, which is we need to focus on the cognitive because we need to get Biden out so that somebody can beat Trump in 24. That's all we care about. Biden says, I'm the only one who ever beat Trump. So you need me. And then Dean Phillips comes along, the only Democrat. He and RFK Jr. Who are, like, willing to run against Biden in the Democratic Party. Why? Because. Did the New York Times write the pieces that they wrote after the debate in 24 about Biden's cognitive decline? No, we talked about it. The Free Beacon talked about it every single day with the Biden Countdown. And they literally blinded themselves. And now they're doing postmortem so they can understand where they went wrong, which is, you know, fine. As I said, I find it very enjoyable. But, you know, Dan Turantine, my friend who was, you know, who was for a year on the Mark Halpern Morning Meeting podcast, said, I can barely. And a Democrat, but kind of like a moderate Democrat. Like, I can barely bring myself to read this story. It makes me so angry because they kept telling me that what I was thinking about immigration was all wrong and that I was being disloyal even to say it. And, you know, that that's something that's important to note for conservatives as the Trump administration goes along right now, which is if people start telling you that you should not trust the evidence of your own senses because it's politically bad and because liberals say that there's an affordability crisis. So you also should say that the affordability crisis is, you should say the affordability crisis is made up by liberals. Don't fall for it. Don't become a cog in a machine that will destroy you, will destroy what you want for the country three years from.
- [60:58]
C
Now. Right. I mean, it sounds like a warning about the, the Pentagon press situation. It's like an allegory for, for that, for, you know, finding a reason to, you know, have to, to get all the networks out and bring in, you know, just sort of loyalist media and new media. This is, you know, and that's, you know, and then, and back to, you know, the Hegset speech and all this stuff. There is, there's definitely a, you know, it's not the same, obviously, with, as mainstream media was in terms of closing yourself off. But there is like this, there's almost like this, you know, the Trump world. There's a desire by some in Trump world to take the thing that gave them the opportunity to win twice and to be here in power and, and kill it. Right? Like the, the thing they had was that they understood their voters under read both sides and their voters understood both sides and they read, they had, you know, Trump reads the New York Times, but he also read, read you know, everything on the right and whatever, this was like their superpower. And then you see, like a desire to, well, can we just pretend the outer world doesn't exist? And you get, and you get hit with stuff like, you know, Epstein and.
- [62:13]
A
Whatever. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's this epistemic. That was the joke, right, is that the left was all enamored of this idea that the right was engaged in what they called epistemic closure, an unwillingness to look at problems on its own side. And all of that. And all of this was being said while the left was destroying itself with its excessive actions on Covid, where they would. They were literally refusing to allow any opposing ideas to be expressed and they were deplatforming people from expressing them. That was Covid. That was affordability, that was inflation. That was, you know, all kinds of things, including, like, Ukraine, like, where Biden was on the one hand talking tough on Ukraine and then withholding arms and withholding help and all that. And all of that was being kept from the people who needed to know it most, who wanted them to succeed. And therefore by, by blinding them to it, they make it impossible for anybody to have. The right is almost, it's almost impossible for people outside of the real lunatic fringe on the right to exist in a world of epistemic closure because the, because liberals are too loud and they have, they command too many of the high, you know, the high water points of the culture. So you can't ignore them, but they, but you can, you know, you can do whatever is. So that, that, that, that's the other funny part is how they constantly were accusing us of things that they themselves were literally drowning in. So. All right, well, look, I, we didn't even get to the Supreme Court's hearing today, the important case involving executive power. And the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the birthright citizenship matter.
- [64:13]
Which. Which is going to be the most important decision they make in this term, if they. In my view. So we'll, we'll. We'll see where all that goes. And I just, just did recommend Kill Bill. The whole bloody affair with the, with the proviso that you understand that A, it's four and a half hours long, though there is an intermission, and.
- [64:33]
C
B, it's really going to ask you, instead of, in lieu of a recommendation, I was going to ask you to recommend, to weigh in on the Paul Dano, Quentin Tarantino thing and recommend one or the other, because that.
- [64:46]
A
Seemed. Paul Dano is a wonderful actor and Quentin Tarantino is absolutely right that Paul Dano is the grave weakness of There Will Be Blood. He is not a credible. He does not do a He is not he does not embody the character he is supposed to embody, who is supposed to be the real rival to Daniel Day Lewis who eats him on screen. So that's where I weigh in on that kill Bill. The whole bloody affair is an amazing piece of work. And the fact that Uma Thurman did not win an Oscar for what Is It? And I'm not a fan of Thermal like a gargantuan Titanic performance is unbelievable. But anyway, that's my that's my recommendation. So until tomorrow for Christine, Eliana, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pod Horiz. Keep the candle burning.
- [65:40]
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